Book Expo Dispatch: A Quick Rant

1.
I thought the world would look different at 7:30am. I had Thoreauvian visions of untainted nature, Dillardesque hopes for remote reflection, Emersonian fancies of transcendent scenery. Instead, Prospect Park was just Prospect Park, albeit sleepier. I didn’t find a transformed world by waking up at such an ungodly Saturday hour, but I did find the group of birders I would spend the morning with. (Bless their hearts, birders are very identifiable, with their conspicuous binoculars, chunky boots, tan vests, and ball caps or fishing hats.)

Thoreauvian? Dillardesque? Emersonian? My apologies. Birding has turned me into a romantic and made me prone to hyperoble. It’s also given me very high expectations. I blame Jonathan Franzen, an avid birder, for this. In the title essay of his collection Farther Away, he writes, “I understood the difference between [David Foster Wallace’s] unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.” He even regretfully wonders if, had he started birdwatching sooner, it would have saved his marriage.

I am new to birdwatching, and I came to it obliquely, via a research divergence. But one cannot just lean casually into the feather fray. You must be immersive. So suddenly I heard myself saying, “I need these Eagle Optic binoculars. I need Birds of North America: A Guide To Field Identification. I need to watch The Central Park Effect documentary and read John James Audubon’s collected writings.” Then, before I knew it, I was perusing the Prospect Park Bird Sightings blog, studying up on patterns, habitats, and behaviors on the subway, and lacing up my L.L. Bean Boots for my first birding adventure.

“I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision,” J.A. Baker writes in The Peregrine. I too never gave birds their due. Before my interest in birding was piqued, my observed natural world was so small it could fit inside a terrarium. My knowledge of birds was little more than the scattering of black “v’s” behind the bubble clouds of my childhood drawings, the seagulls hovering on the beach when I dropped a Dorito, and the city pigeons disarming me with their boldness. I could identify a robin, a blue jay, and the other obvious culprits, but beyond that, I didn’t have the eyes to see something that deserved a name, a genus, or a journal entry. My ignorance was so pervasive that as a child, I frequently asked for the name of the black birds that murmured through the sky and sat on phone lines. I never got an answer. These birds were anonymous yet ubiquitous. No name, no distinctive traits, barely even a shape. To me, they simply existed as shadows of the idea of a bir-dah. My learning curve was as steep as Bambi’s. Birds were just flying, pecking, perching creatures, uniform and unassertive upon my consciousness, the monks of the skies. And this is why I embarked on birding: to watch the richness of these feathered creatures unfurl like the beauty of a monk’s interior life. Birds “know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us,” J.A. Baker continues. “Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse we can never reach.”

2.
February 2, 2014. I hit the fields. My new binoculars stowed in my backpack, my birding journal scribbled with a few preliminary notes, and I was ready for my inaugural adventure. I biked into Prospect Park with only a vague idea of where to go, and I was still a little mystified about how one actually finds birds. I had been reading a lot about the ins and outs of identification, but how one sees them in the first place was apparently too obvious for any birder to mention, though I wouldn’t have minded having my intelligence insulted.

I pulled off onto a path that led to some water. As I walked, I told myself to just keep looking up. I gazed into the naked trees, vacant and dull. Maybe winter birding was going to be harder than I thought. I had imagined finding a cloistered log that I could perch on while waiting for various species to peek out or fly by. But even in February, Prospect Park had a lot of foot traffic and even more fences and muddy lawn restorations, limiting me to the broader, paved paths. Lesson #1: Birding means walking.

As I looked at the map, deciding where to go, I heard something. A bird, clearly, but what kind? Was it visible? I looked up for motion, colors, rustling, anything, but I could only see bare branches. So I leaned my bike against the fence, pulled out my binoculars, and held them to my face. I haphazardly directed them towards the birdsong, high up in the tops of the trees. Bam! A red mark filled my vision. I was looking at a bird! Somehow, I had managed to set my gaze directly on a stunning specimen: a red-bellied woodpecker. Of course I had no idea at the time what I was looking at, but I was captivated, breathless, awed. Through the binoculars, I felt like I could touch the woodpecker’s blazing head, as it ducked in and out of a hole. This bird had all the proper pomp fit for my birding inauguration. I was so excited I could have watched it for days, but I noticed another person was standing beside me. I lowered my binoculars.

“See anything?” the woman asked.

“Yes! Some sort of woodpecker!” I exclaimed and pointed. “I have no idea what kind.”

“Oh, that’s a red-bellied woodpecker.”

I saw the woman had her own pair of binoculars around her neck. “Are you a birder?” I asked. She nodded.

“It’s my first time out!” I was still giddy, and eager to get back to watching my newfound love. “This is the first bird I’ve ever seen through binoculars!” I couldn’t get the exclamations points out of my voice.

I was ready to go back to watching the woodpecker, but Kathy wanted to keep talking. She was giving me tips on where to go in the park, different clubs, the use of Twitter.

“Have you seen any birds today?” I asked.

“Yes, but just the usual ones.”

“Like what?”

She rattled off a long list, and none of them sounded usual at all. “I’d be happy to see any of those! It’s all new for me.”

We chatted some more until she went on her way. I turned back to the tree and held up my binoculars, but alas, the woodpecker had moved on too. But I was grateful. The first time I lifted my binoculars to my face, I not only saw an exquisite creature, but I got a taste of the warm community of birders.

I strolled for the rest of the afternoon until my toes went numb, but my list — birders are all about lists! — acquired 12 new birds, some familiar, some not, but they all looked exotic under my newly attentive eyes.

3.
When Annie Dillard watched a free-falling mockingbird spread its wings just shy of the ground, she reflected: “The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” Even in Brooklyn, the world’s virtues are everywhere on display, but I had only flippantly and irresponsibly engaged with them, noting pigeons and sparrows, but ignoring the 300 of North America’s 700 bird species that were migrating through New York City each year. “The obligation of a human being is to attentiveness,” I’ve heard Marilynne Robinson say. “Life is always a matter of intensity, and intensity is always a matter of focus,” Christian Wiman writes. I had a lot to learn about life from birding.

4.
April 14, 2014. Finally, it flitted through my lens. The rare visitor to Prospect Park had had groupies from all over the borough seeking it, but by the time I arrived at the special locale, there was just one other birder. The Yellow-Throated Warbler was tiny, and preferred the highest boughs; its motion was gleeful. I tried to follow the acrobatics, lowering my binoculars when it disappeared and raising them quickly when it reappeared. I had only seconds at a time to marvel at its glimmering throat a misplaced crown. I temporarily trained my eyes to only see the warbler, but my internal voice distracted me: “You’re so lucky someone tipped you off!”; “Your first rare bird!”; “Log this now!”; “Take it in!” I tried to listen to the last directive most of all.

The warbler stunned me. Watching it was exhilarating. Witnessing its beauty felt like a bracing privilege.

Then, just like that, it vanished. I waited around, hoping it would return, but it didn’t (to the dismay of a couple who had just arrived). Finally, I continued on my way, feeling nourished, expanded, light. If before I hadn’t been fully convinced by this new hobby, after that I was hooked. I strolled for another hour or so, looking for my next hit of beauty, each one so fleeting that it couldn’t be hoarded but demanded constant pursuit.

5.
The irony of picking up a hobby that requires attentiveness is that it’s distracting. One weekend, while I was playing catch, the feathery shadows and birdsongs pulled my attention up to the left and right like a marionette. And now when I’m outside with friends, I find myself struggling to focus on the conversation. Rather than being present, I reach for my binoculars. By learning birdwatching, I might have actually made my initial challenge to learn attentiveness ever harder since I’ve filled my multi-tasking arsenal with one more diversion. And I’ve put myself at a higher risk for a social anxiety that has acquired its own acronym FOMO: the fear of missing out. Every nice May day that I haven’t chased the jeweled Spring migrants fills me with regret. The failure to chase a Summer Tanager, because I’m too hungry and tired, pings me with sadness.

“Bird-watching is an exercise in balance,” Jonathan Rosen writes in The Life of the Skies. It also requires prioritization and parameters. I quickly learned that there is a distinct hierarchy of birds. The rarer a bird, the more valuable. Basic economics. At first, it felt unjust to see a gorgeous blue jay or magnificent cardinal dismissed simply for being common, even though their colors and patterns are anything but. However, I think such partiality is part of sifting through abundance. Take the time to still notice the familiar, but chase what is scarce. There is so much beauty, once we finally look for it, that we would be toppled by it if we didn’t exercise some sort of scrutiny.

Birdwatching isn’t all romance and sublimity, though. It can also be frustrating. Your feet get tired and sometimes, you just may not see anything. “It’s the writer’s life, really,” Jonathan Franzen says in The Central Park Effect. “Any artist’s life is failing, failing, failing, waiting around, thinking nothing will ever work again. All the interesting birds are gone. Nature’s falling apart. And then, suddenly you’re seeing a prothonotary warbler, and all of that is forgotten. There’s this moment when the world is okay.” I’m sure that is why birding felt so foreign to me. I’m not naturally inclined to persevere through failure. I think many of us miss out for this same reason. We are too busy inspecting our peers on Twitter and Facebook. We mope in our failures and miss out on our own lives. And this isn’t a 21st-century problem! As Florence Merriam, an American ornithologist and nature writer, observed in 1889: “We are so in the habit of focusing our spy-glasses on our human neighbors that it seems an easy matter to label them and their affairs, but when it comes to birds — alas!, not only are there legions of kinds, but, to our bewildered fancy, they look and act exactly alike. Yet though our task seems hopeless at the outset, before we recognize the conjurer a new world of interest and beauty has opened before us.”

When I went on my first communal birding trip with the Brooklyn Bird Club at 7:30am, I wanted to step right into a new world, but I had to walk to find it. As we traced the park by following its boughs instead of its paths, Prospect Park was finally turned upside down. It transformed it into the otherworld I was hoping to enter upon arrival. Transcendence is not about when you look, but how. After a few hours of walking, and over 20 new additions to my list, the Park was as unfamiliar to me as a street aglow with Christmas lights. Its trees were decked with doodads: a great blue heron, a pine warbler, a blue-headed vireo, a downy woodpecker, and more. And so for a brief moment, my worries and woes were held at bay. Right there in my urban backyard, the world had been made new for me because amid such lavish Thoreauvian, Dillardesque, and Emersonian displays, I had learned to see the birds through the trees.

Image Credit: Flickr/Derek Keats

This past Monday, I watched the Boston Marathon. I live in Newton, so I went over and watched it about a mile from my house. I was standing a little before mile 19, from about eleven that morning, until about one. So nothing had happened yet except the marathon itself.

Patriots’ Day is always this particular Monday, closest to April 19th, which is also always the first Monday of school vacation. I haven’t seen a marathon for years, because we’ve usually been away. But this year I was here, and I felt pretty silly that we have been living so close by for so long and I hadn’t gone to watch. I knew there would be a festival sort of atmosphere. I knew it would be one of those heart-warming community events that make you feel good about humanity, although I didn’t know exactly how it would work. On Monday, I woke up feeling a little fizz of excitement, to be honest.

One child was away on his school vacation, with my husband; one child was asleep, because she’s a teenager; one was going to come with me but reneged at the last minute. So I biked over alone. I was feeling sad about that, but then lo and behold when I got there and parked my bike, I realized that across Comm Ave.—on the other side of the course—were my brother- and sister-in-law, who don’t even live in Newton and could have been spectating from anywhere along the 26.2 miles, but were instead precisely where I was. I crossed over. “God didn’t want me to be alone at the marathon,” I said.

It was early; I didn’t realize how early, marathon-wise, it was. There were a few wheelchairs, and a few of the elite women. Most of them had already gone by. We were now waiting for the elite male runners. Before long there was a phalanx of motorcycles, and photographer trucks, and then, finally, a small pack of slender men. “Oh,” breathed Teresa. “Oh. They glide.” We marveled at the efficiency of their strides. Their faces didn’t show strain but, rather, authority. Then they were gone.

Following the leader pack was the rest of the elites, more spread out. A kid near us had a vuvuzela, which nicely punctuated things. We could see each individual runner; clap and cheer; and then chat some more. We talked about how my husband—one of four brothers—ran the marathon in high school, and how a couple of years later no one in the family was running it and so another brother, Sam, called John, the brother I was standing with now, on March first and said, “You training yet?” That was back before you had to qualify. They both ran it, that year, in four hours.

John—no longer a runner, but a dedicated walker—said he started wearing Rockports after he saw a guy running in them one year. We saw a barefoot guy go by. A few Vibram sock-shoe guys.  On the edge of the other side, Marines, in full gear, were walking the route. My nephew is a Marine; Teresa said his pack, in basic, had been seventy pounds. We hollered, “Thank you!” to them. They waved back.

There was still an anticipation I couldn’t identify; all the elites had passed. Whoever was going to win had come and gone.

Then I noticed my bike, which I’d left on the other side, was about to tip over. So during a lull I dashed across to fix it. There was a lemonade stand there, and I bought a chocolate chip cookie. I took a bite and then felt sort of ridiculous, being surrounded by these low-BMI types, so I stuck it in my pocket. Then I waited for a chance to cross back. But it didn’t come. The flow of runners was steadily increasing.

I waited five, ten minutes. I was stuck. I shrugged theatrically, across the four lanes, at my brother- and sister-in-law.  I was alone again, but the woman I was standing next to, who had her two kids with her, was very nice. She was one of those people you just start talking to—and marathon day is one of those times you just start talking to people. But we didn’t talk much, because our business now was cheering. The runners were constant now. At first they stayed, decorously, in the right lane, next to us. I thought of calling to John and Teresa to come over to me, because I was closer. I could see the runners’ faces, their shirts.

The shirts were the thing. You began to want connection. You began to read the shirts. “Go Children’s Hospital!” “Go Brazil!” “Go Denmark!” “Go Chile!” “Go Friends of Griffin!”

Some smart ones—repeats, probably—had their names magic-markered on their fronts. “Go Kelly!” “Go Doug!” “Go Manuel!” “Go Chris!”

Some people were in costume. “Go hamburger!” “Go bee!” “Go Wonder Woman!”

There’s a guy from my church who’s run two dozen Bostons, always in costume. This year he was going as Prince William. I kept watching, but never saw him. I thought it would be impossible to miss him; but I hadn’t realized, really realized, how many people there would be. They had now spread across Comm Ave to all four lanes. We had been standing in the street since the lemonade stand was behind us, but now we had to get up on the curb, to make room. They filled the whole road edge to edge.

I was reading shirts as fast as I could. I had started clapping, and now I couldn’t stop. How could you stop? It wasn’t like a play with a standing ovation and eventually your hands are killing you and even though the thing was brilliant you have to stop. This was slow, steady clapping, for the steady stream of runners. My hands went numb. I kept clapping, and the runners kept coming.

A guy with a huge head of blue hair. “Go hair!”

Three shirtless guys. “Go shirtless guys!”

More friends of Griffin. “Go friends of Griffin!”

There were all the people raising money—“Go Dana Farber!” “Go Mass General!” You couldn’t really yell, “Go brain cancer!” so you hoped those people had names on their shirts, or instead you yelled “Great job!”

There were municipal running clubs and ballerinas and the Easter Bunny and Anchorage and Kansas City. There was Duke and Trinity and Wayne State and lots of Michigans, for some reason. There was Army and Navy and the Air Force Academy, and there were still the Marines trudging by.

Maybe because—as I now realize—it was still on the early side, meaning these were the qualifiers with better times, I didn’t see a lot of agony. There were a few who would start walking, head down. We said “You can do it,” and “You’re amazing,” which I meant, because I would sooner eat cement than run a marathon. One woman panted, “How many more hills?” but then she was gone. One guy handed us an empty plastic water bottle as he passed and said, “Do you mind throwing this away?” One guy slowed down to shake the hand of one of the walking Marines and said, “Thank you for your service.” The Marine said, “It’s an honor.” I was in the presence of people who could run a marathon and, at mile 19, still talk.

John and Teresa waved across at me and left. An old guy came by selling cowbells and I bought one. I let the kids near me use it for a while and then they gave it back and I could use it instead of clapping, and the feeling gradually returned to my palms.

But I had to keep making noise. Because they kept coming. We were standing at the top of a hill and you could look down Comm Ave. and see a river of people with no end. The excitement and the good cheer were so high and I realized I kept standing there because I was waiting for the climax, the resolution; but of course there wouldn’t be one. Not here at mile 19. I could feel, in the muted exhilaration of the runners, two-thirds of the way there, Heartbreak Hill still to come, how the marathon would be its own self-contained narrative, its own drama, for each of them. It would have its own plot, its own rise and fall of action, and I would be a tiny, tiny part of it, some crazy-lady voice yelling, “Go Cedar Rapids!” somewhere along mile 19, along with all the screaming Wellesley women, all the Boston College kids, all the hands holding out cups of water, all the clapping, all the cowbells; the despair, the nausea, the temptation to stop, the pushing through; the journey up, and then down Heartbreak Hill, and down Beacon Street, and then Boylston, and under the clock, and over the finish line.

I stayed for more than two hours but I finally left, although it felt like leaving in the middle of a movie, because I had errands to run on that day off. Two hours later, I would call my kids, to see whether they liked the crunchy or the puffy cheese doodles from Trader Joe’s, and they would tell me what they were seeing on T.V., and I would hurry home.

What I experienced Monday was an ordinary marathon. The awe at the human effort, the thousands of stories running by, the endurance, the athleticism, the will—it was all run-of-the-mill extraordinary. If there is such a thing. People wiser than I have loved the marathon for years. I just discovered it, really, and next year, without question, it will be different.

As I write this they haven’t yet found who did it. It’s looking more and more like domestic terrorism, and I suspect it’s only a few people, or even just one, someone pathetic who has slid over the line into evil, looking up bombmaking directions online. But even if it’s a larger conspiracy—even if it was some vast international network—it is dwarfed by what I saw on Monday, on Commonwealth Avenue, at the top of just one of the many hills (there are always more, there is always one more): the runners coming, coming, not stopping. Thousands. Thousands. Thousands.

Image: Stewart Dawson